Monday, January 16, 2017

When Blood Reigns

About
the Book

Title:
When Blood Reigns

Author:
Barbara Custer

Genre:
Horror / Science Fiction

Marked
for death, Alexis accompanies her lover, Yeron, and four survivors of
a zombie invasion on a search for the renegades who created a
chemical that induces a zombie-like state. On
the way, ravenous
flesh-eaters
attack Alexis’s team; one survivor turns on
her.
She realizes too late that the renegades have been tracking her
every move.
When officials capture her, she becomes deathly ill. Can DNA splicing
save her? Will
Yeron’s attempts at rescue jeopardize all
their
lives?

Author
Bio

Barbara
lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she works full time as a
respiratory therapist. When she’s not working with her patients,
she’s enjoying a fright flick or working on horror and science
fiction tales. She’s published Night
to Dawn magazine
since 2004.

Other
books by Barbara include Twilight
Healer, City of Brotherly Death, Infinite Sight, and
Steel
Rose;
also novellas
Close Liaisons and
Life Raft: Earth.
She enjoys bringing her medical background to the printed page, and
then blending it with supernatural horror. She maintains a presence
on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and The Writers Coffeehouse forum.
Look for the photos with the Mylar balloons, and you’ll find her.

In
the gloom, her light cut jagged circles around three skeletal figures
weaving through the door. Their bloated, pus-stained faces drooled
blood and saliva, two of them bald, and the third with a hollowed-out
skull. Two more figures lurched through, followed by others. All of
them worked swollen, blistered jaws, their groans sounding like
pebbles rattling in their windpipes.

Alexis
screamed.

She
couldn’t kill them all, not with one hand carrying a flashlight.
This was worse than the invasion at Jackson Hospital. Back there, she
had daylight and the men with her. Now she only had her Maglite. She
could pick them off with her thoughts, one by one, and maybe take out
three, but the rest would be on her. Maybe she could sedate them with
the blue ray. Then she’d step over them and run.

More
walkers crowded the doorway. Alexis backed away from the door,
step-by-step, stall after stall, firing the blue ray. The figures
kept coming, their cadaverous faces relentless and hungry. Oh,
God, the sedative’s not working! She
ducked inside a stall and climbed onto the toilet seat, bracing
herself against the partition panels. On the panel, her light
revealed a double toilet paper holder with a shelf;
above, the head rail, and then a thick pipe running along the
ceiling. Her right foot went onto the toilet paper shelf. She grabbed
the edge of the panel, screaming from the pain flashing through her
hands, and then hooked her left elbow around the head rail. The right
elbow followed, both feet on the shelf, the figures closing in on
her.